Wengrow, D.

Introduction: a clash of civilizations?

pp. 1-16

What makes civilization?: the ancient near East and the future of the West

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Course of Study: ARCL0123 - Themes in Palaeoanthropology and Palaeolithic Archaeology

Title: What makes civilization?: the ancient near East and the future of the West
Name of Author: Wengrow, D.

Name of Publisher: Oxford University Press

 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

reading and commenting upon various drafts. I would

particularly like to thankSusan Sherratt, NealAscherson,
Stephen Qyirke, Eleanor Robson, Harriet Crawford,
Norman Yoffee, Andrew Bevan, Tim Schadla-Hall,
Corinna Riva, and Stephen Shennan. All will recognize INTRODUCTION:
my continued debt to the work of Andrew Sherratt and A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
Roger Moorey. BIeda During brought to my attention
the writings of Kaiser Wilhelm on the origins of king­
ship, and Wendy Monkhouse those of Isaac Newton.
Michael Rowlands, whose own interest in civilization
coincided fortuitously with my own, went beyond the Our subject is the birth of civilization in the Near
call of duty in helping me think through the purpose of East. We shall not, therefore, consider the question
the book, and his work with Dorian Fuller has been a how civilization in the abstract became possible.
direct inspiration. Mukulika Banerjee was a constant I do not think there is an answer to that question; in
companion and source of ideas in the final stages of any case it is a philosophical rather than a historical
one. But it may be said that the material we are going
writing. Mary Shepperson worked hard to produce the
to discuss has a unique bearing on it all the same.
maps, and help in obtaining other images was generously
Henri Frankfort, The Birth ojCivilization in the
provided by Augusta McMahon, Wilma Wetterstrom,
Near East (1951)
Mary:-Anne Murray, Geoff Emberling, Chuck Jones,
Stuart Laidlaw, and Krzysztof Cialowicz. I must also We are now in the middle of a full-blown Jihad,
thank Ghilad Zuckermann for allowing me to borrow that is to say we have against us the fiercest preju­
the phrase 'camouflaged borrowings' from his studies of dices of a people in a primeval state of civilization
... We·ve practically come to the collapse of society
language development. I am happy to expose the debt.
here and there's little on which you can depend for
Finally, Rinat Koren contributed to the production of its reconstruction.
this book in more ways than I can possible acknowledge.
From the diaries of Gertrude Bell, Britain's
For her, no words can express my love and gratitude. Oriental Secretary in Baghdad (1920)

T he historian Lucien Febvre once warned that to

seek the origins of ,civilization' is to embark upon a
series of dangerous excavations ('sondages hasardeux').

xx

INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
Tracs and Dacians/
Map 1. The ancient Near East
He was referring to the murky etymology of a word that
first entered European languages during the late eight­
eenth century, in an age of empire and revolution. Its
genesis in the philosophical writings of the Enlighten­
ment is elusive. Among the earliest attestations comes
in the third volume of Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger's
l:Antiquite devoilee par ses usages (~ntiquity Revealed by
Its Customs'), a 'critical examination of the main atti­
tudes, ceremonies, and religious and political institutions
2 3
Use the term
"peoples" (for the
INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS)
various human
societies/cultures)
of the different peoples of the earth'. Posthumously
published in r;66, this was one of a number of highly
theoretical works in which Boulanger sought to bring
order to the complex history of human political relations.
An earlier volume, Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme
oriental (1761) had laid foundations, asserting the exist­
ence in Asian societies-both ancient and modern-of a
type ofpolitical subject alien to Europe: a subject passion­
ately wedded to his own oppression, 'kissing the chains'
that bind him, and heroically sacrificing his life at a
tyrant's whim. In l:Antiquiti Boulanger advised the
administrators of his day: 'When a savage people has
become civilized, we must not put an end to the act of
civilization by giving it rigid and irrevocable laws; we
must make it look upon the legislation given to it as a
form of continuous civilization.'
Febvre's choice of archaeological metaphor is appo­
site. The idea of civilization has always been linked to
the desire for universal history; a history that transcends
written records, extending back in time to the origins bf
our species, outwards in space to encompass the full
range of contemporary human diversity, and-at least in
its early formulations-onwards into some improved
future condition. Today we might again be inclined
towards the anti-utopian interpretations of civilization
that proliferated around the middle of the twentieth
century-Sigmund Freud's juxtaposition of culture and
sexual fulfilment, or Franz Steiner's dark vision of the
West as a society that, through technology, has finally
tamed the primeval spirits of the corn and wilderness,
 INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
only to succeed in driving its demons deep into the heart
of society itself. In origin, however, civilization was a
profoundly optimistic concept, whose adherents believed
fervently in the natural tendency of human history
towards a synthesis of scientific reason and moral
progress. By 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte set out to
conquer Egypt, it had also become a powerful source of
political rhetoric, and a cause worth dying for.
John Headley (2000) has cogently argued that the
European notion ofhuman history as a 'civilizing process'
of universal dimensions long predates the use of the word
civilization itself. He finds it, for example, in Late Renais­
sance interpretations of the Greco-Roman 'cosmopo­
lis'-a civic community forever coming into being and
expanding through its transformation of a barbarian
periphery. In adapting the ancient ideas ofpo/is and civitas
Jesuit scholars and administrators ofthe sixteenth century,
such as Giovanni Botero and Jose de Acosta, found a
cultural compass around which to orientate the newly
'discovered' peoples of the non-Christian world. On the
basis of technological traits-such as the possession of
writing, planned and permanent settlements, monu­
mental masonry, and sophisticated equipment for eating,
clothing, and waste disposal-certain pagans were
deemed further along the road to full humanity, and
hence more prepared for evangelization, than others:
In the De procuranda Indorum salute Jose de Acosta had made
the two features ofliteracy and settlement, but chiefly literacy,
4
INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS)
the prime determinants for distinguishing different degrees
of civilization within the broad category of barbarism. Thus
the Chinese as most obviously literate as well as settled
recommended themselves in the first category, the Mexicans
and Peruvians as settled but only most primitively literate
belonged to an intermediate category, whereas such nomadic
pre-literate peoples as the Brazilians and Chichimeca revealed
a pre-social condition ofutter savagery. By defining a measure
of civilization religiously neutral according to the determi­
nants ofliteracy and settlement, Acosta had in effect provided
a fragile, slender ledge upon which could be extended the
broadly recognized and even admired architectural and social
features of the Mexican and Incan peoples. spectrum
from
civilized to non-
At the height of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
civilized
imperialism, the idea of civilization as a quantity that
Unlineal model
can be identified to a greater or lesser extent in all
described, west
human societies achieved the status of scientifically
develops the
verifiable fact. Racial type-measured and classified on
primitives...
the basis of phenotypical features such as skin colour and
skull form-came to be regarded as an accurate indi­
cator of a population or individual's place within the
specrum of 'civilized' and 'non-civilized' peoples. The
status of the ancient Near East as a 'cradle' or 'birthplace'
of civilization was paradOXical in this regard. It reserved
an exalted role for this region in the making ofthe modern
world. But it also implied that civilization had since
moved on, from ancient Near East to modern West. In
the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, many Euro­
pean visitors to the Near East wrote of its neglect; of the
loss of civilization and a subsequent reversion to some
the unilineal model does not explain why the
Near East the5
birth place of civilisation moved
to modern West..(based on the unilineal
model it should progressed further and
faster...not loss of civilization...reversion/shift)
 INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
more primeval state. The idea of a 'cradle of civilization'
also suggested the need for external custodianship of a
threatened legacy, imposed by force if necessary (cradles,
after all, are occupied by helpless infants, not responsible
adults). This was partly a matter of explaining why vast
quantities of antiquities needed to be brought to Europe
and America for study and safekeeping, but it also reso­
nated with contemporary political affairs (the collapse of
Ottoman authority and the growth of European mili­
tary power in the region), and with the wider intellectual
concerns of Victorian scholarship, particularly in matters
of race and imperial conquest.
'Civilization', wrote James Henry Breasted (186S­
193s)-the founder of Chicago's illustrious Oriental
Institute, 'arose in the Orient, and Europe obtained it
there.' The history of the Near East could, he argued, be
understood as a series of titanic struggles between the
Indo-European and Semitic peoples, who converged
repeatedly upon the 'Fertile Crescent' of western Asia
from their respective homelands on the steppes ofcentral
Asia and the deserts of Arabia. The struggle, wrote
Breasted in 1916, 'is still going on'. As historian Thomas
Scheffler (2003) points out:
Breasted's geo-strategic view ofancient history betrayed some
striking parallels to the imperialist zeitgeist of his own times.
By and large, the area he designated as the 'Fertile Crescent'
was geographically coextensive with those parts of the
Ottoman Empire that the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 had
reserved for Great Britain and France [i.e. the Levantine
6 7
INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
coast, eastern Anatolia, and Mesopotamia]. By 1916, when
Ancient Times was published, the USA had not yet entered
the First World War, and the King-Crane Commission had
not yet submitted its famous report of 28 August 1919, recom­
mending an American mandate for Asia Minor and Syria.
Nevertheless, the language Breasted used for describing
the Fertile Crescent indicated how much he was aware of the
region's pivotal geo-strategic importance, especially for the
control of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.
Contemporaries of Breasted wrote with conviction about
the lack ofa warrior caste in the indigenous literary tradi­
tions of the ancient Near East, drawing contrasts with
the elite fighting bands ofIndo-European mythology. It
was widely argued that technological prowess in the arts
of combat (exemplified by their use of the horse-drawn
chariot) allowed these 'proto-European' warrior groups
to intervene-periodically and decisively-in the geo­
politics of ancient Near Eastern states. Ideas of this kind,
laced with Boy's Own bravado, were offered to explain the
collapse of palatial civilization throughout the Near East
at the end ofthe Bronze Age. In his monumental Struggle
of the Nations, Director General of Egyptian Antiquities
Gaston Maspero (1846-1916) drew particular attention to
a scene carved on the walls of a New Kingdom temple at
Abydos, in southern Egypt. It shows Ramesses the Great
flanked by running bodyguards whose horned helmets
and short swords identified them as Shardana (Sardin­
ians) and, by the racial criteria of the day, as 'European'
or 'Indo-Aryan'. The inability of a monarch to raise a
native army, and his reliance upon foreign mercenaries,
 INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
had been taken by European intellectuals since the
Enlightenment as a defining characteristic and weakness
of 'despotic' political systems. (The Ottoman Sultanate,
which then controlled much of the Near East, was
regarded as the prime exemplar by virtue of its depend­
ence upon elite units ofMameluke and Janissary fighters.)
Moreover, in Egyptian iconography the job of protecting
the king's body usually falls to gods, not men, implying
an almost superhuman status for these immigrant warriors.
The monuments appeared to offer ancient foundations
for what many Europeans felt was their pre-ordained role
in the Near East: protectors and preservers of a civilized
tradition, under threat from modern populations whose
links to that tradition had long been severed, or had never
existed at all.
Today the concept of civilization, reinvigorated after
a brief post-colonial slumber, is undergoing a further
transformation. 'Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and
fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of
history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in
the sands of time.' The writer was Samuel Huntington,
late Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard
University. In 1993 he published an article entitled 'The
Clash of Civilizations', which took issue with arguments
presented by his former student, Francis Fukuyama. In
a 1989 piece which later developed (as would Hunting­
ton's response) into a full-length book, Fukuyama had
proposed that world history was entering a new phase,
characterized by:
8 9
INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
the end of mankind's ideological evolution and the univer­
salization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government. This is not to say that there will no longer
be events to fill the pages of Foreign Aifairs's yearly summaries
of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has
occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and
is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there
are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will
govern the material world in the long run.
Huntington disagreed. His response, which duly
appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs, argued that
human societies-far from converging upon any
common form of organization----':are in fact experiencing
a return to tribalism, and on a scale unprecedented in
history, a 'civilizational' scale. What Huntington meant
by civilization was made admirably clear in the opening
very good paragraphs of his essay:
quote here to
explain the A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic
dynamic rise groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct
cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The
and fall of
. culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from key
civilization that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a
not as merely common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German for
from primitive villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural under
to civilised features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese commu­ standi
nities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part ng
of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. "civiliz
A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people
and the broadest' level of cultural identity people have short of ation"
that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is
defined both by common objective elements, such as language,
 INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective
self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a
resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of
intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a
European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs
is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely
identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as
a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations
change.
As Huntington developed his interpretation of current
world affairs-the genocidal breakdown of former
Yugoslavia, the proliferation of sophisticated weapons in
non-Western states, and the formation of new economic
blocs in East Asia-the concept of civilization began,
for the umpteenth time in its turbulent history, to
mutate, blending into the new political scenery, taking
on new energy. Civilization, for Huntington, was rapidly
becoming both cause and explanation for the uglier side
of global politics, as well as the means to its resolution.
The West, misguided in its old-fashioned and mono­
lithic notion of civilization as a universal value, would
now have to face up to the existence of 'civilizations',
plural. In a vision that owes more than a little to the
archaeological imagination, Huntington explains how
the Cold War cast an ideological veil over deep and
enduring fissures in the fabric of humanity, which­
with the removal of the Iron Curtain-are now showing
again on the surface of the globe. Humanity, he proph­
esies, will be pulled apart along the bloodstained lines
of old civilizations. Each of them is transnational in
10
INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
scope, is universal in outlook and ambition, and draws
sustenance from firmly rooted-and mutually incom­
patible-beliefs about how people should live their
lives, bury their dead, produce and consume goods,
experience sexuality, and pursue spiritual fulfilment.
These arguments have provoked an outpouring of
responses. Embraced by some political philosophers
as revelatory wisdom, they are condemned by other
commentators as monstrous abstractions: fuel to the
flames of those very fundamentalisms they purport to
oppose. In a scathing review for The Nation (October
2001) Edward Said, the late Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,
launched a frontal assault:
In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to
make 'civilizations' and 'identities' into what they are not:
shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the
myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human
history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that
history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial
conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization
and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush
to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted
here we start to warfare that 'the clash of civilizations' argues is the reality.
disagree with
Huntington: Remarkably, Huntington's thesis has as yet been little
clash is only commented on by the rearguard of civilization studies­
one component the archaeologists and anthropologists whose disciplines
of the were first called into being as a means of establishing
interaction, what civilizations are, how they first developed, and the
there is also
exchange, 11
trade,
cooperation/
cross
fertilization
 INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS)
manner in which they evolve. Huntington himself
invited such commentary. In his expanded work on the
clash of civilizations (subtitle: 'the remaking of world
order'), he acknowledges and seeks to incorporate their
contributions to the debate. The early history of civiliza­
tions that he sketches out is a history of isolates:
For more than three thousand years after civilizations first
emerged, the contacts among them were, with some excep­
tions, either nonexistent or limited or intermittent and
intense. The nature of these contacts is wel1 expressed in the
word historians use to describe them: 'encounters'. Civili­
zations were separated by time and space ... Until 1500 the
Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations had no contact with
other civilizations or with each other. The early civilizations
in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus and Yel10w
rivers also did not interact.
To illustrate the putative isolation of early civilizations,
of no small importance for his larger arguments, Hunt­
ington borrows an image from Carroll Qyigley's (1961)
The Evolution of Civilizations. Resembling an inverted
shrub, it portrays ancient civilizations as branching out
from a common set of 'Neolithic Garden Cultures',
carefully avoiding one another as they evolve, split, and
mutate.
Part I of this book is a reply, by an archaeologist, to
Huntington's claims about the lack of interaction
between early civilizations. Its focus is the ancient
Near East, which I take here to include both Egypt
and Mesopotamia. But the points I make about the
12
INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
interconnectedness of prehistoric and ancient societies
could be extended to all of the other regions mentioned
by Huntington, and a considerable (if rather special­
ized) literature already exists to that effect. Some
readers will by now be suspecting the presence in our
midst of a straw man. Is it not obvious that Hunt­
ington, who never pretended to be an expert on the
ancient world, has grossly overstated his case? Have
not the connections between ancient Egypt, Mesopo­
tamia, and their neighbours been recognized for well
over a century?
My answer to this is that some straw men have a
habit of resurrecting themselves, even after numerous
attempts at incineration. Burning them is not a one-off
exercise, but a 'moveable feast' that must be periodically
repeated in order to remind us ofwhat we already know,
or have a tendency to forget. Most studies of 'early civi­
lization' continue to focus upon a single region, or on a
series of artifiCially isolated regions, with little atten­
tion to the relationships between them. By and large,
we are still bound to a view of the ancient world as
populated by 'Greeks', 'Egyptians', 'Mesopotamians',
and so on, who are supposed to think and behave in
distinctly 'Greek', 'Egyptian', 'Mesopotamian', etc.,
ways. The first part of this book questions the validity
Key
of such distinctions, arguing that cultural identities in
point the ancient Near East were the product of interaction
and exchange, rather than isolation. But it also goes
beyond these issues, to address the singular qualities
that differentiate Egypt from Mesopotamia, and the
13
 INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS)
persistence of those differences over thousands of years,
despite the flow of influences and materials between
them.
A Little Background
The study of Egypt and Mesopotamia does not begin on
an equal footing. As one ancient historian observes,
there has 'never been a "Babylonia-mania" in Western
art, literature, architecture, or design to rival Egypt's
hold on pre-modern Europe' (Lundquist 1995: 67).
Certain features and memories of ancient Egyptian
culture were known, celebrated, and imitated in the
West long before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic
script in the early nineteenth century, notably through
the medium of biblical and Greco-Roman texts, as well
as travellers' reports of the impressive stone monuments
still visible on the Giza plateau and elsewhere in the
valley of the Nile. The same sources also preserved a
memory of the great empires of Me·sopotamia, the land
between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The king­
doms of Assyria and Babylonia were recalled, if only
through the eyes of those they subjugated. But by
contrast, the earliest literate culture of the region-that
of ancient Sumer, occupying today's southern Iraq-was
completely unknown to European scholarship just a
century ago. Its cities, temples, and scribal archives lay
buried deep within the artificial mounds known as tells,
formed by the accumulation of mud-brick architecture
over millennia of human habitation.
14
INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
Today we are aware that during the third millennium
BC, which forms the chronological focus of this book,
Egypt and Mesopotamia witnessed-more or less
simultaneously-the emergence of dynastic polities on a
scale then unprecedented in human history. Like their
associated systems of writing, the earliest in the world,
these polities took on strikingly different forms. The
heartland ofurban societies in Mesopotamia lay between
the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, on
the alluvial plains extending south of modern Baghdad
to the marshy head of the Persian Gulf. By the end of
the third millennium BC, written sources routinely refer
to the southern part of this area as Sumer, a region made
up of politically independent city-states in which a
variety of languages (including Sumerian and Akka­
dian) were spoken, but whose inhabitants nevertheless
recognized a common religious and cultural identity. By
contrast, the 'Two Lands' ofUpper and Lower Egypt-as
hieroglyphic sources refer to the valley and delta of the
Nile-constituted a single unified kingdom, held
together by a sacred monarch whose territorial control
extended from the First Cataract of the Nile at Elephan­
tine (near modern Aswan) to the Mediterranean Sea.
Since Henri Frankfort wrote his 1he Birth ojCiviliza­
tion in the Ne.ar East (1951) (the last major comparative
study of early Egypt and Mesopotamia) our under­
standing of these societies has increased exponentially.
So too has the loss and destruction of ancient sites and
artefacts through industrial dam construction, conflict,
and looting. Dramatic increases in knowledge have
15
 INTRODUCTION: A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?

nevertheless taken place, notably in the field of prehis­

toric archaeology, providing a much fuller account of
the background to the emergence of the first dynastic
states in each region. And the spaces between and
adjacent to them have been gradually filled in by evidence PART I
for societies of comparable scale and organizational
complexity, such as the remarkable kingdom of Ebla in
western Syria (whose capital, at Tell Mardikh, was THE CAULDRON OF
discovered by Italian scholars in the 1960s), and the
previously unsuspected Oxus (or 'Bactria-Margiana') CIVI LIZATION
civilization of central Asia (uncovered by Russian
archaeologists in the 1970s). These new revelations, and
the dense web of connections which they reveal between
the societies of the ancient Near East, serve only to re­
inforce the interpretive challenge posed by 'the birth of
civilization';

For a comparison between Egypt and Mesopotamia discloses,

not only that writing, representational art, monumental
architecture, and a new kind of political coherence were
introduced in the two countries; it also reveals the striking
fact that the purpose of their writing, the contents of their
representations, the functions of their monumental build­
ings, and the structure of their new societies differed
completely. What we observe is not merely the establishment
of civilized life, but the emergence, concretely, of the distinc­
tive 'forms' of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization.
(Frankfort 195[: 49)

16